I think just saving it lol

Buying a new mattress and frame with my wife
idk spending like $200 on local business and nonprofits
saving the rest lol

gonna put those funds towards any medical bills my right foot incurs
it's been driving me insane the pain ive got mang

my 401k bcuz im not low on money now

Paying debts

also paying debts

I had a job as a tree climber for a year and I wanted better equipment for myself, I had accrued a couple hundo on a credit card already but then I thought it would be kosher if i just got close to maxing out the credit card to pay for good stuff for the job. Chainsaw resistant pants, a better handsaw with a sheath that velcro'd to my leg, winter chainsaw climbing pants, etc.

I quit my jobbie not longer after that and was already blowing my money before I could completely pay off the card. I had to keep using the card to stay afloat so it's been teetering on maxing out, and it's been a balancing act of just keeping it in line since. I'll use my trumpbux to pay off the card, and use the remainder to keep paying my bank for the car loan I got through them

Quote from: Karel on April 12, 2020, 11:55:55 AMalso paying debts

I had a job as a tree climber for a year and I wanted better equipment for myself, I had accrued a couple hundo on a credit card already but then I thought it would be kosher if i just got close to maxing out the credit card to pay for good stuff for the job. Chainsaw resistant pants, a better handsaw with a sheath that velcro'd to my leg, winter chainsaw climbing pants, etc.

I quit my jobbie not longer after that and was already blowing my money before I could completely pay off the card. I had to keep using the card to stay afloat so it's been teetering on maxing out, and it's been a balancing act of just keeping it in line since. I'll use my trumpbux to pay off the card, and use the remainder to keep paying my bank for the car loan I got through them

were you an arborist? that is my dream job for if i get burned out of corporate life

it's just going to end up going toward rent, bills, etc. mostly just like the rest of my money

but some of it will also be useful for a new apartment in july and a new tank for ridley this summer as well

Quote from: strongbad on April 12, 2020, 12:35:42 PMwere you an arborist? that is my dream job for if i get burned out of corporate life

An arborist trainee, yeah. You probably know you need 3 years of experience (or a related degree +1 year of in field experience). With some tree conservation work I've done plus that one year, I'm probably sitting around 2 years of experience if I want to get that certification

Some of it was undoubtedly cool. Learning about tree biology was great experience. The company paid for me to get a CDL B license and my pesticide/herbicide license. And I learned a lot about the trees and shrubs people have in their landscape. And if you like thrills, getting into a large tree is surreal. Also, many practical skills. If I ever needed to take down a large tree by myself, I can do it. Working a chainsaw and chainsaw maintenance, a breadth of different knots, identifying stress, diseases, and pests in the landscape, etc.

I've grown to detest customer service, though, after working at restaurants, coffee shops, selling merchandise in pop-up stands, and even at being an arborist for mostly suburban types. I've come to learn that a great deal of people have unrealistic expectations about most things, whether it is rooted in their own ignorance or because they inherently think that whatever they want done can be done. Some people want their trees to be butchered and have gotten short with us if we tried to tell them it's incredibly bad for their trees. And even some of our sales representatives for those clients would tell us to do things that were  dangerous or also plainly bad for their landscape. Or working for very wealthy people who can throw money at anything, they'd just want us to take a beautiful tree that has been expertly pruned for years out so they could replace it with something else, because they didn't like the original tree anymore.

And beyond all that, the arboriculture industry is still filled with the old guard: conservative late gen x'ers that have a shitty attitude and blow up during work that can easily make the work day completely miserable. My workplace only had a couple of those types among 20ish people, but they're attitude was infectious. They're also the kind of type to just suck up to the boss and stay late all the time, creating a precedent no one should have had to follow in the first place since our original work was grueling enough, sometimes. No one really liked either of them, but our manager wouldn't fire them because they would take on the shit jobs nobody else wanted to have, and they used that as leverage to get anything they wanted. Since they were foreman, they often took the job of climbing and would bury us with cut tree limbs and the like, and they wouldn't try to have full conversations with customers, they would just do whatever the customer wanted which often meant extra work for us and ruining the timing of our day.

Even if they weren't there, I got more than a feeling that nobody actually wanted to work at that place. People often talked about trying to find something new, how much they felt their souls were being sucked out, or even just plainly wishing they could be fired to get out. Plant technicians who did spray work for diseases, pests, or just fertilizing were expected to strain themselves to make a shit ton of extra money for the company. Their profit margins were already big but sales reps would breathe down their necks to do even just a little bit more. Even though they wore personal protective equipment to a high degree, they said it still wasn't enough to keep awful chemicals off of their bodies. In their parts of the seasons, they'd often do 10 hour days and anyone who did less was frowned upon. And worse than that, our company was national and had locations in every state in the US, but we were one of the few places that had our managers expecting us to work through in-climate weather conditions, through snow, rain, sleet. We were already making less than average compared to other companies, because most of our profit went to Research & Development and then onto our sales reps.

On the flip side, our company more often than not did pursue safety, but anybody who was unsafe can quickly undo that since it was on the team in the field to check each other. I had a few instances of near death. One of the gen x'ers above dropped a white oak log that was 200~ pounds, from a height that got it nearly to full speed of gravity, landed a foot away from me that could've easily killed me. I always paid attention to what was happening, but I had to be near the trunk of the tree at the top of  a tight angled hillside to rig a log down for a different climber in the tree. They both started their chainsaws around the same time, but the gen x'er could've easily taken notice of what we were doing. He just wanted to go fast and get shit done.

I had a couple lines rigged to go far out on a limb of a river birch tree, one for balance on a small limb above the branch I was walking on and one as a main support system far higher up in the tree, to handsaw trim some limbs just above a few wires that hung from the electric poles to this ladies house. It was to give clearance from the tree to the wires. I was so close to reaching the limb and had to go only a foot more. The line I used for balance had too much pressure on the limb once I gave slack to my main support line to reach out. I was walking backwards along the limb, so I fell back beyond the point I was trying to cut, a branch union where two branches split off in a wide V-shape. My main support fortunately stopped me from falling far enough, just before I would be touching the wires (they weren't dangerous, but if one of the wires was frayed, I could've gotten shocked, and there was no realistic way of me knowing that). My ascension pulley and prusik got stiff from the sudden fall so I couldn't ascend up from where I was. I had to feel the tail end of my rope beyond the two wires and have our guy on the ground pull it away from the wires so I could descend away from it as well. Even getting to that point sucked. I had to pull myself up on the rope to get my prusik and pulley device loose with one hand. It wasn't pretty.

The other time I was at this insanely rich person's house. It was like old money combined with high Republican influence. A gigantic yard with visual garden spaces here and there, and some huge old shade trees. They hosted a fundraiser for George Bush before he announced his presidency, so he and his acolytes were all at this place. Anyway, toward the back end of the property, we had to take down this monstrous black cherry tree. It was nice to have a huge yard like this so we could take down big leads and branches without worrying about rigging it up to fall gently. It was supposed to be my first big spike job. I got into it well enough, and got to a point where I could start piecing off big sections. I got myself ready and in place to take down one big portion. My foreman told me to set my secondary support line below another branch union of the tree instead of where I had originally placed it because he said cherry trees are notorious for peeling big sections of bark even if you notch it correctly.  Good call, so I did that and sent it down. I turned around and set myself in that fashion for the big lead behind me. The branch was coming out in a lower angle. I had put my notch in a that I couldn't exactly see how deep it was, but it wasn't deep enough. I started back-cutting my notch to let it fall on its own, and it swiftly gave away because of the weight on that angle. And it peeled in a way that caught my secondary line, it didn't suck me into the stump of the tree I was spiked into in front of me, but it did tug on it enough to scare the fuck out of me. If I hadn't set my line lower like he told me, it could've been bad. Or if the branch did a barber chair, it could've flung up and hit my face. I lost my mental game after that, and got done so my foreman could finish the tree.

There's other instances, and a lot of the more senior people at the place had their own tales where they injured themselves but still stayed with the industry because they didn't want to make less or perform a monotonous job. At least for that line of arboriculture work, people settle for that job and not necessarily seek it out. They might seek it out at first but eventually everyone begrudgingly sticks with it. If that's the side you were interested in, honestly, don't let it be your dream job. And I could be projecting a bit because of how much I detest customer service now, but don't let that fog up everything else I said.

THAT BEING SAID, there are other cool jobs to do through arboriculture. The conservation and nonprofit industry is more gratifying and typically has a great cast of workers who are nice and wholesome and everything else. It feels great to be apart of restoration projects and lead groups of volunteers to plant trees, spread mulch, or cut invasive species.

Also, I recently found out the new company I work for also incorporates tree climbing for their field researchers. There aren't any big trees where I'm at, but some of our other locations will call for their workers to get into a tree for an assessment of phenological phases throughout the year or taking cuttings of diseased limbs back to a lab for identification and sampling. It's pretty tight and I hope I would be able to do something like that someday.

best thing is u can smoke the trees u grow

heck yea

I'LL BELIEVE IT WHEN I SEE IT

Quote from: Karel on April 12, 2020, 02:59:49 PMTHAT BEING SAID, there are other cool jobs to do through arboriculture. The conservation and nonprofit industry is more gratifying and typically has a great cast of workers who are nice and wholesome and everything else. It feels great to be apart of restoration projects and lead groups of volunteers to plant trees, spread mulch, or cut invasive species.

Also, I recently found out the new company I work for also incorporates tree climbing for their field researchers. There aren't any big trees where I'm at, but some of our other locations will call for their workers to get into a tree for an assessment of phenological phases throughout the year or taking cuttings of diseased limbs back to a lab for identification and sampling. It's pretty tight and I hope I would be able to do something like that someday.

Enjoyed the post. Yeah I think I really just idealize the whole "getting paid to climb trees" aspect but that does still seem to be a large part of the job. But yeah the amount of time that it takes to actually get certified is what keeps me from perusing it, but  who knows maybe some day